Atlantic Monthly | Page 8

in manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care. She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart and "Thine forever."
Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister. First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury, for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter. They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic, and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies should find rest there.
Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women in New England might be walking to execution with their male companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.
It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on, the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is, therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims of others, but